Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Well, hello and welcome to the Dividend Cafe on this very special holiday weekend as we celebrate

the 250th birth of our nation, the 250th anniversary of our freedom,

of our independence, and commemorate what is this American experiment in the greatest nation on

God's Green Earth. I am a patriot. I am excited for the holiday. I hope you are all excited,

not only for the holiday weekend and the barbecues and events or whatever you have planned,

but for what the holiday represents. But of course, in the meantime, we have some business in front of us.

It's the midway point of the year and i think that it's important

for us to look at what has transpired so far in 2006 and see if we can draw any themes as to what may

be in front of us for the rest of the year there's going to be a handful of charts here today

but why don't we dive right in and just sort of talk about what 2006 has represented so far?

I'm going to use some of the themes and forecasts that I laid out at the beginning of the year

as a reference point, and we'll kind of evaluate where some of those things stand,

and like I said, draw some perspective on the second half of the year.

I'm going to start off with this question.

If I told you on January 1, we're at the beginning of the year,

and I said to you at that time that the Mag 7, which is this magnificent seven nomenclature around these

mega, mega cap companies that have become so unbelievably integral into the market. If you're

curious what they are, it is Nvidia, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, and Apple, of course.

And so if I told you at the beginning of year that whether it's equal weight or cap-weight

that the MAG-7, as we get to the midway point of the year, was going to be down 2%.

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